


your bright eyes render all discussion pointless

by queenbaskerville



Series: in the old grip of the familiar [1]
Category: Dark (TV 2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Missing Persons, Missing Scene, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Season/Series 01, Season/Series 01 Spoilers, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:07:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23795872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenbaskerville/pseuds/queenbaskerville
Summary: Charlotte's point of view, in the aftermath of Jonas's disappearance.
Series: in the old grip of the familiar [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1740445
Comments: 11
Kudos: 94





	your bright eyes render all discussion pointless

**Author's Note:**

> got introduced to dark and now i'm obsessed send help
> 
> title from ["flight 717: going to denmark" by the mountain goats](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i_AwS-M0o8)

**(3)**

Hannah comes by the station once a week.

"Anything?" she says.

It's usually Wöller who's there, who answers. Sometimes it's Charlotte. Sometimes it's somebody else.

Every time, they say, "No, I'm sorry."

And Hannah nods. She doesn't sniffle, or weep, or tear at her hair. She doesn't scream like the Obendorfs. She doesn't shout like Ulrich used to. She nods, and she leaves. And she comes back again the next week.

It mystifies Charlotte. That day when Elisabeth had walked home alone from school, when, for a few desperate hours, Charlotte thought her daughter had been taken, it had been like the world was ending.

And maybe it had been like that for Hannah, too, at first. 

* * *

**(1)**

"I waited for him," Hannah says. "I thought maybe he was with a friend. That he'd be back in the morning."

She hasn't cried yet. This is her second time being interviewed—it is Wöller who responded initially to the call, who'd gone to Hannah's house—but even with him, she'd kept her expression tight. Calm. 

The only things that betray her are her furrowed brow, the tight corners of her mouth, and her trembling hands, which she wrings in her lap.

"But I knew," she says. "I knew when he didn't come back from school."

She pauses. Looks down at her hands.

"You said he did come home, once?" Charlotte asks, looking over Woller's notes, making her own in her notebook.

"His lip was bleeding," Hannah says. "He said he got in a fight."

"With whom?"

"He wouldn't say," Hannah says. "He said—"

Hannah meets Charlotte's eyes. There's steel, in those eyes. A steel wall. And behind it—

"He said it didn't matter," she says. "He said everything would be alright."

—Grief.

Hannah sits there, in the chair in front of Charlotte's desk, and she looks like she is already in mourning.

"Then he said he left something at school," Hannah says, "and he walked right out the door."

"We'll look for him," Charlotte says. 

She has already stopped promising mothers that she will _find_ their sons.

They make the rounds, ask the questions. Jonas had been in a fight with Bartosz Tiedemann, according to Martha Nielsen. She'd stopped them fighting at school. No, he hadn't said he was going anywhere. No, neither of them said what the fight was about. Jonas isn't young, Martha says. Whoever took Mikkel and Erik and Yasin, they were clearly looking for boys under fifteen, right? Not someone like Jonas, Martha says, over and over. It can't be that. He can't be gone.

They go to the Tiedemann house. They speak to Bartosz, who sits on a couch between his mother and his father, secure between their shoulders. His mother's arm is wrapped around his back.

Yes, he and Jonas had fought. Yes, Martha had stopped them. No, the fight wasn't serious—just stupid teenager stuff, he says.

Bartosz starts to weep, at the end of the interview. 

"I hate him," he says. "I want him to come back."

* * *

**(2)**

The search party that combs the woods behind Hannah Kahnwald's house is small. There is not much hope left in town that any of the missing boys will be found, even as bodies. Charlotte, Wöller, a few other police officers, and some concerned Winden citizens make up the party. Peter comes, too, guilt layered behind his eyes. Martha and Bartosz come. Hannah does not.

"You think he hanged himself," Bartosz says after the instructions for the search are given.

Martha sways on her feet.

"You think—?" she says.

"From one of these trees," Bartosz says. He gestures at the woods around them. "That's why we're here. Isn't it?"

Charlotte takes a deep breath. She glances to Peter. It had been a conversation they'd had at their house, once Franziska and Elisabeth had gone to bed. 

Peter had said, "Did I neglect him as a patient? In all this, did I forget him? We hadn't spoken much. Enough. At all. His medicine—his _father—_ "

"It is not your fault," Charlotte had said. "Whatever it is."

It was all she could say. Peter had not been good at their marriage. But he'd been good at his job. And with all this—the time travel, the boy's body falling into the bunker—Charlotte had sat with Peter in their home and held his hand. It is not your fault, she said. Peter had tried to believe it.

"It is a possibility we cannot rule out," Charlotte says.

"Wouldn't he have done it in his house?" Bartosz says. 

"Well," Charlotte says, "he isn't in his house. So this is our next place to look."

They comb the forest. Jonas isn't there. Not laying on the ground dead, eyes burnt out of his face. Not hanging from a tree. He's not there at all.

Another boy, vanished.

* * *

**(4)**

Jonas comes home an older man. Charlotte doesn't recognize him. It is hard to believe who he says he is.

Except—the eyes.

It's not even necessarily that old Jonas looks like young Jonas. It's that old Jonas looks like _Hannah_. Worn. Tired. Beaten down.

It's despair, that's what it is. There is almost no hope left.

Charlotte's eyes flit now and then to the scar around his neck, thick and dark, years old. Maybe even decades old. Charlotte remembers what Michael Kahnwald's body had looked like after the hanging. When did it happen—when had Jonas given up? And what had stopped death from taking him then, as it had taken Michael?

She doesn't ask. She has more pressing problems—her parents, the boys who are still missing—but she watches this new Jonas Kahnwald and understands that he carries his father with him on his neck and his mother with him in his eyes. She wonders if that comforted him while he was alone in the future, if there were still mirrors after the apocalypse. 

Her daughters—and what day is it, when was the last time she'd been home, when had she last pressed her nose into Franziska's hair, last touched her forehead to Elisabeth's?—Charlotte hopes her own children never look like that. Scarred and scared and alone.

If Jonas is right, if everything can be changed, then they never will.

Charlotte can save them. And she _will_ save them. She holds onto that.


End file.
